Despite their enormous diversity, the bauplan of adult winged insects (pterygotes) is remarkably conservative since the Lower Devonian: a five-segmented head, a three-segmented thorax with three pairs of walking legs and an eleven-segmented abdomen without any non-sexual appendages 1 and 2. The only known exceptions are the abdominal appendages of adult male sepsid flies on the fourth segment; however, these are also used as copulatory organs and are supposedly maintained through sexual selection [3]. Here, we report a rod-like paired appendage from the third and fourth abdominal segments in adults of the Southeast-Asian Hemiptera taxon Bennini (Figure 1A,B; Supplemental information). These are fully musculated, innervated, and movable and bear highly organized sensory and secretory units. The appendages, termed LASSO (lateral abdominal sensory and secretory organs), are consistent in topology and structure in all species studied and not sexually dimorphic. The existence of these non-sexual abdominal appendages reveals the potential of the 300 million year old conserved bauplan of insects.
In order to investigate their microcracking behaviour, the microstructures of several β-eucryptite ceramics, obtained from glass precursor and cerammed to yield different grain sizes and microcrack densities, were characterized by laboratory and synchrotron x-ray refraction and tomography. Results were compared with those obtained from scanning electron microscopy (SEM). In SEM images, the characterized materials appeared fully dense but computed tomography showed the presence of pore clusters. Uniaxial tensile testing was performed on specimens while strain maps were recorded and analyzed by Digital Image Correlation (DIC). X-ray refraction techniques were applied on specimens before and after tensile testing to measure the amount of the internal specific surface (i.e., area per unit volume). X-ray refraction revealed that (a) the small grain size (SGS) material contained a large specific surface, originating from the grain boundaries and the interfaces of TiO2 precipitates; (b) the medium (MGS) and large grain size (LGS) materials possessed higher amounts of specific surface compared to SGS material due to microcracks, which decreased after tensile loading; (c) the precursor glass had negligible internal surface. The unexpected decrease in the internal surface of MGS and LGS after tensile testing is explained by the presence of compressive regions in the DIC strain maps and further by theoretical arguments. It is suggested that while some microcracks merge via propagation, more close mechanically, thereby explaining the observed X-ray refraction results. The mechanisms proposed would allow the development of a strain hardening route in ceramics.